Editor’s note: As the Press-Register celebrates its 200th anniversary, the newspaper and AL.com are taking a decade-by-decade look at major events that shaped Mobile and Baldwin counties, the Gulf Coast and the nation during those years. Today we look back on the years from 1880 to 1889.

Mobile entered the 1880s suffering the effects of the “seven years’ depression” wrought by the aftermath of the Civil War and the Panic of 1873.

It left the decade with a new city charter following a painful bankruptcy, a professional fire department and the beginnings of modern roads.The decade also marked important developments in the the evolution of Mardi Gras.

Historian George Ewert in “Mobile: A New History of Alabama’s First City” dated the depression from 1878 to 1885.

According to “New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910,” the Bank of Mobile collapsed in 1884.

This archive photo shows a woodworking factory located on North Water Street in downtown Mobile in the 1880s. (File photo)

Author Don Doyle wrote that Mobile’s economy also took a blow from rapidly declining cotton prices and new railroads that gave Black Belt farmers alternatives to Mobile’s port.

“The reversal in the early 1880s only accelerated an earlier downward trend in the share of the total decentralizing, moving away from the ports and toward interior towns where new merchants, banks, and compresses were emerging to serve cotton farmers,” he wrote.

A bad economy coupled with over-borrowing and spending had tipped Mobile into bankruptcy, and the state Legislature revoked the city’s charter in 1879. Three receivers and an eight-member board of commissioners reorganized municipal government under the auspices of the “Port of Mobile.”

Ewert wrote that the state-controlled authority went right to work tackling the debt. He cited a report issued by the commissioners in March 1880 showing that the floating debt had been cut from $120,000 to less than $32,000. The report thanked Mobilians who paid back taxes and criticized those who had not.

It was under this temporary government that City Hospital of Mobile changed its name to Port Hospital in 1880, according to a history on the University of South Alabama Medical Center’s website. According to the website, the Port Hospital dismissed Daughters of Charity -- the Catholic order that had been running the public hospital -- amid allegations of misappropriation of hospital funds.

“It was a preposterous charge of which they were later completely exonerated by the city and the public at large, but for which no adequate amends existed,” the website states.

Mobile regains control

The receivers placed in charge of solving Mobile’s debt crisis immediately opened negotiations in New York with bondholders and struck an agreement that the Legislature ratified in December 1880. Under the deal, the creditors agreed to accept 51 cents on the dollar, and the city agreed to a 25-year repayment plan.

The deal was not universally popular. Ewert wrote that some creditors took the city to federal court in an attempt to collect the debt.

“By 1885, the issue of debt had diminished; even though it was not completely resolved, it was reduced to a manageable problem,” Ewert wrote.

A 1905 Mobile Register story praised the authority’s handling of the debt crisis.

“The chancery court and the officers of the trust have seemed at times unnecessarily strict and arbitrary, but being advised that any other than a strict compliance with the contract might endanger the entire settlement and bring back the $5,000,000 debt upon the people of Mobile, they could not be otherwise,” the article stated.

But Ewert wrote that residents began to chafe under an austerity program that capped government spending at $100,000 a year. The limits hindered basic services, and Mobile languished in the development of roads, drainage systems and water service, he wrote.

“Because the debt issue was no longer a pressing one and because the economy of Mobile was slowly recovering from the seven-year depression, the restrictions on city government voluntarily accepted in 1879 increasingly seemed a handicap and an irritation,” he wrote.

The state Legislature established a new city government in December 1886, and the following year, local rule returned to Mobile.

The city held an election in March 1887 for seven aldermen, and the following year voters cast ballots for eight councilmen and a mayor. That form of government would continue until a Progressive-era reform in 1911 that created the three-member City Commission that ruled until the 1980s.

Ewert wrote that a young lawyer named Joseph Carlos Rich defeated Richard Owen, who had been the port president under the caretaker government, in the election of 1888. The new mayor set about trying to improve long-neglected infrastructure and engineered two significant reforms -- returning Mobile to city-controlled public markets for food sales and creating a professional fire department.

Return of public markets

Under Rich’s leadership, Mobile invested heavily in its public markets and restored the monopoly they had enjoyed prior to Reconstruction. The new law mandated that money generated from auctioning stalls to vendors be earmarked for the street department.

Radical Republicans who seized control after the Civil War had broken the monopoly with passage of a “green grocer” law that allowed vendors to sell food anywhere in the city.

The leadership of the day had believed the city-controlled monopoly kept prices artificially high.

Ewert wrote in “Down the Years: Articles on Mobile’s History” that the reform had cost the city treasury a great deal of money. Mobile made money by auctioning off stalls to entrepreneurs selling all manner of fresh fish, fruits, vegetables and other food.

In “Mobile: A New History,” Ewert wrote that Mobile opened a fifth public market, called Orange Grove Market, on the north side of town. The city also renovated the four existing markets.

The restoration of the public market system did not come without a fight. Ewert wrote that one grocer sued but lost his case in the Alabama Supreme Court, which upheld the city’s right to tightly regulate food sales.

The city also beat back efforts in 1889 to weaken public markets by allowing the sale of fresh poultry by licensed dealers.

There is no question that the new law had its desired effect, however, according to Ewert. He wrote that even after subtracting the cost of buying Orange Grove and renovating the other markets, Mobile saw net revenue of $6,000 during the first year.

Professional fire department

According to a history produced by the Mobile Fire Department, the business of putting out blazes reached a milestone in 1888 with the creation of the city’s first full-time, paid fire department.

According to that history, the city -- over the objections of the volunteer firefighters -- hired Mathew Sloan as the first chief at a salary of $1,200 a year and paid $3,000 to buy the equipment from Phoenix Volunteer Co. No. 6.

In “Mobile: A New History,” Ewert offered a flavor of just what a sacred cow the volunteer fire companies were at the time. Mobile in the 1880s had nine active volunteer fire companies and one inactive one, each with 80 to 120 members. Each operated independently but belonged to an association that was partially city-funded, and each maintained its own firehouse and recruited its own volunteers.

According to historians, the volunteer fire companies formed the social center of Mobile. Ewert wrote that annual fireman’s day parades rivaled -- and perhaps surpassed -- Mardi Gras in popularity.

“Nevertheless, in September 1888 the city ended perhaps the most popular and entrenched tradition of nineteenth-century Mobile -- volunteer fire companies,” he wrote.

There had been trouble brewing. Complaining of inadequate funding, the Mobile Fire Department Association threatened to shut down the firehouses and strike on Sept. 1, 1888. Ewert wrote that the volunteer companies sometimes fought with one another when two or more reached a fire at the same time.

Insurance companies used to pay a bounty to a fire company for arriving first to a fire. Accusations surfaced in the 1880s that some firefighters set fires on purpose in order to collect the bounty, according to Ewert.

Ewert wrote that the city enrolled the members of Creole Steam Fire Co. No. 1 in the city’s new professional fire department, and a new era began on Sept. 8, 1888.

Mardi Gras advances

The 1880s were big years for Mobile Mardi Gras. According to a history of the city’s Carnival on the website of the History Museum of Mobile, the Strikers Independent Society stopped parading after 1884 but continued to hold grand New Year’s Eve balls.

According to “Mobile Renaissance: Celebrating Mobile’s Tricentennial,” John A. Pope and musician friends gathering in 1883 to celebrate the birth of his son formed the Excelsior Band. The following year, according to the History Museum of Mobile, it made its Mardi Gras debut.

In 1884, David Levi founded the Comic Cowboys, which would become legendary for political satire during annual parades under the “without malice” slogan.

The Michael Krafft Association formed in 1881 in order to create a combined mystic society made up of members of the Cowbellion de Rakin Society and the Order of Myths. But the larger group folded seven years later.

The Cowbellion de Rakin Society stopped parading and held its final ball on New Year’s Eve. From 1888 to 1912, its members would meet for an annual supper.

The year 1887 saw the first electric-lighted ball, as the Infant Mystic celebrated at the Princess Theatre.

According to “Mobile: A New History,” local promoter Thomas Cooper De Leon in 1885 gave up the theater to promote the competitive drills of militia groups that had become important social organization in post-war Mobile.

Other developments

Mobile commercial interests took a giant step forward in 1888 with completion of a 23-foot ship channel, allowing deep-draft oceangoing steamships to dock in Mobile for the first time.

On Dec. 31, 1889, businessman A.C. Danner won a contract from Mobile to pave Dauphin Street from Royal to Claiborne streets. Still, Ewert wrote, it would be decades before street-paving would occur in earnest.

According to “Historic Mobile: An Illustrated History of the Mobile Bay Region,” the city in 1889 built its fourth courthouse. Designed by Rudolph Benz and built at a cost of $60,763, the building was an elaborate Victorian structure, richly decorated with classical details and sculpture and topped with a massive clock tower that dominated the skyline.

Merchant S.H. Solomon, according to “Mobile: A New History,” advertised a phone at his business in 1880, promising to take orders from people who had their own phones. Three years later, the city government installed its first telephones.

The Mobile County Training School opened for black students in 1880.

In 1885, workers built Middle Bay Lighthouse in Mobile Bay. A Replica of Hooper Strait Lighthouse on Tangier Sound in Maryland, the 1½-story cottage was home to series of lightkeepers -- and one cow. The cow, according to “Mobile Renaissance,” was brought in for a baby who would not nurse. Both baby and cow evacuated as a hurricane approached in 1916.